The Night of the Doctor
by AKs-on-show
Summary: A novelisation and expansion of the minisode. The Time War rages through the cosmos and the Doctor does what he always does: try to make things better. But the crimes of his people are coming back to haunt him as he is forced to trek through the hostile wastes of the planet Karn in a desperate attempt to save a woman who doesn't want his help. Night is falling on the Doctor.
1. Prologue - The Unexpected Doctor

**'The Night of the Doctor'**

based upon the minisode by Steven Moffat  
starring Paul McGann and Emma Campbell-Jones as the Doctor and Cass

* * *

**A/N:** _I absolutely, completely loved 'The Night of the Doctor', the seven-minute Paul McGann minisode. I never in my wildest dreams thought that I'd get to see my Doctor again on TV, but I did and it was amazing. The 1996 film was middling at best, but the Big Finish audios are astonishing and the eighth is absolutely one of my favourite Doctors._

_He mentioned Charley and Lucie and Molly, made Big Finish's eighth Doctor stories canon in one fell swoop and every bit the awesome Doctor I've fallen in love with the last few years._

_So I decided to novelise the minisode! And, well, expand on it. Because if 'Night' had one problem, it's that it wasn't long enough. As epic and awesome as it was I sort of want my Doctor to go out with the full orchestra, so imagine a full, forty-five minute story depicting the eighth Doctor's final adventure? I wanted one. And I decided to write it._

* * *

Prologue:  
**The Unexpected Doctor**

* * *

Her ship was dying.

It bucked beneath her, sparks falling from burnt out consoles and damaged conduit housings. Flashes lit the darkened cockpit, temporarily brightening dull red twilight of the emergency lighting.

Briefly, Cass wondered when she'd come to think of this flying hunk of junk as _her ship_. It handled like a brick, the thirty-nine year old twice-rebuilt engine had a tendency to give out at any given moment and the bulkheads and deck plating creaked ominously before every hyperlight jump. The onboard computer was a temperamental nightmare with an obsolete AI and a voice recognition system that had taken half a year to get used to her slight accent. The ship didn't even have a proper name.

It was an absurd notion, connecting with a heap of metal and circuitry, the same as any of a million travelling the spacelanes, but Cass had indeed connected with the old bird, and even through the adrenalin and terror that was coursing around her body, she felt a sharp pang of guilt and grief.

I'm sorry, she thought to herself, sparing a moment to caress the sharp metal edge of her control console, that I can't save you. With that display of emotionalism and rank sentimentality aside, Cass focused all of her not inconsiderable skill on trying to keep herself alive.

She was a pilot, a highly-trained pilot, who had graduated with full honours and a citation for conspicuous gallantry from the Taylor Flight School on Ulysses 519. She had garnered full marks for situational awareness and she had near-record reaction times. She had a reputation for keeping a cool head in stressful situations. She was one of only five students in the school's long, storied history to successfully complete the Jobis Crisis simulation.

Her anti-authority streak might have condemned her to flying out-system scouting and cargo runs, but that in no way undermined the reality that she was talented.

It took only a few moments for her to fully assess her situation.

It took a moment more for her to realise how hopeless it was.

In the very next moment, she resolved not to give up.

The ship was going down, there was no way around that. Scientists and theoreticians and magicians had found ways to bend and subvert the physical laws of the universe, propelling ships across the stars at phenomenal speeds, reorganising matter at the subatomic level, altering the flow of time. Gravity, however, was still a universal constant, even if there were ways around it... if only she could find some way of reactivating the microgravity drive...

The great rocky planet that loomed before her out of the forward screen, however, had other ideas. It was pulling the dying ship in ever closer, at ever-increasing velocity.

She had to think of something, though. She was damned if she was going to die out here, alone. She'd volunteered to take control after the ship had been damaged, to remain behind and try to keep it from crashing. The rest of the crew had fled to safety, burning out the teleporter.

Tapping at her console, holding on for dear life, she took an inventory of which systems remained functional: the artificial gravity, the oxygen scrubbers, the water recyclers... the long range communications system! Sending a message this far off the main space lanes was like calling for help in the middle of a desert, but it was worth a shot.

She hit the control for the transceiver array and was gratified to see it activate without any complaints. The first time since she'd come aboard that it had done that. Figures.

"Help me!" she called, broadcasting across all frequencies in the ordinary and subspace bands. "Please! Can anybody hear me?"

The ship's computer, the AI's voice recognition system keyed to understand calls of distress, came to life. In a maddeningly calm, cool feminine voice, it said "Please state the nature of your ailment or injury."

"I'm not injured, I'm crashing!" Cass nearly screamed with frustration. The planet was getting closer and closer by the second, the pull of its gravity well inescapable. "I don't need a doctor."

The computer cheerily ignored her. "A clear statement of your symptoms will help us provide the medical practitioner appropriate to your individual needs."

_Us_. The computer was still using collective pronouns, as if it was connected to the Federation Datanet. Stupid machine, Cass thought, with no small amount of bitterness. "I'm trying to send a distress signal!" she spat. "Stop talking about doctors!"

"I'm a doctor," a voice answered her.

It wasn't the computer's pre-recorded tones, but a deep, sonorous male voice, ever-so-liltingly accented. Cass spun in her chair just as an overhead panel exploded in a spray of sparks and escaping coolant. The accompanying flash temporarily blinded her, and as she blinked the floating purple blobs in her vision resolved into a short, lean man with cropped brown, wavy hair, with a handsomely lined face.

"But probably," he said as he stepped towards her, "not the one you were expecting."


	2. Chapter One - The Time Lord Cometh

**'The Night of the Doctor'**

based upon the minisode by Steven Moffat  
starring Paul McGann and Emma Campbell-Jones as the Doctor and Cass

* * *

Chapter One:  
**The Time Lord Cometh**

* * *

"Where are the rest of the crew?" the man asked, stepping next to Cass' console and peering at the readouts.

As taken aback by his outlandish dress, featuring a battered leather coat and, bizarrely, a rumpled white cravat, as his sudden appearance, Cass couldn't help but answer him. Maybe it was her desperation to survive this debacle. Maybe it was the calm way he carried himself, the friendly wisdom and authority he exuded with every word, every movement. Maybe she was just too damn surprised to protest.

"Teleported off," she answered.

"But you're still here?" he asked, turning his head around sharply to peer at her. He seemed to be taking in everything. She could practically hear gears turning in his head.

"I teleported them," she said with a shrug, as though it was the most obvious thing in the galaxy.

"Why you?" the man pressed as he looked at the other consoles, checking readouts and flicking a few dead switches.

"Everyone else was screaming," Cass answered. Not a flattering assessment of her crew's actions but an accurate one. The accident had been sudden and catastrophic and most of the crew had been wounded, including the captain. The panic had been immediate and total. Cass, the highest-ranking uninjured member of the crew had taken charge.

At this, the man spun around again. He looked at Cass intently and she thought she detected admiration in his gaze. "Welcome aboard," he said, no evidence of stress or worry in his voice.

Cass nearly laughed at the absurdity of it all. "Aboard what?"

He offered her his hand. "I'll show you."

She looked at his outstretched fingers and he gave them a tantalising little wiggle. The alarms were still blaring, the ship was still shaking itself apart, but time seemed to slow in that instant. She met his gaze, saw it burning with... what? She couldn't quite tell, but it thrilled and reassured her in equal measure. She was a pilot, used to making snap decisions, choosing which course to take when any delay could mean the difference between life and death.

The ship was going down; Cass couldn't delay. She took his hand.

He led the way from the cockpit, his booted feet pounding the deck. Cass, her hand clutched in his, followed. He seemed to know his way around the ship, moved with a confidence Cass recognised. It was the same kind of confidence she had in her brighter moments, a surety about herself and her place in the universe. From her, though, it had been considered by others to be unattractive, dangerous, and she had come to distance herself from it; in this man, though, she saw how beautiful that kind of confidence could be.

In that moment, Cass loved him more than she'd ever loved anybody because his confidence assured her that she'd survive.

She had no idea where he was taking her, though, as he led from the cockpit aft through the corridor, past the abandoned crew quarters and common spaces, past the burnt out teleporter, towards the rear cargo pods. They dodged exploding conduits and burst coolant lines, struggled to keep their footing as the dying ship shed components on its unavoidable dive through the big brown planet's upper atmosphere.

"Where are we going?" she demanded.

"Back of the ship!" he answered, as though the answer were obvious.

Which, Cass supposed, it was, but it still wasn't the answer she was looking for. "Why?'

"Because the front crashes first, think it through," he said, just as they reached the end of the corridor. A heavy door fell as they bolted for it, blocking off the accessway and magnetically sealing with a fatalistic clunk.

She clapped her hands to her forehead and spun away, her brief moment of hope dashed.

"Why did you do that?" the man asked the door.

"Emergency protocols," she said, looking at the door. The computer automatically locked down compromised sections to try and limit the spread of damage. The small viewport in the hatch was dark, so she couldn't see beyond it and judge what kind of damage had been done but she hoped against hope it was something simple, like a radiation leak or a fire, instead of an explosive decompression. Speculation was pointless, though, since even her access codes couldn't open the door now. The man was not to be deterred: he'd taken a small probe with a red light at the end from the pocket of his coat and was running it back and forth across the door.

"What's your name?" he asked, and she heard his device emit a high-pitched fluting noise.

"Cass."

"You're young to be crewing a gunship, Cass," he said, his tone light and conversational despite how dire their situation was.

"I wanted to see the universe," she said with a resigned sigh, leaving unspoken everything that implied: she'd grown up poor, on a backwater colony world the Earth Empire had long since ignored, and she'd gone to Ulysses 519, to the prestigious Taylor Flight School, because the military was the only surefire way to escape poverty and boredom. "Is it always like this?"

"If you're lucky," the man said over his shoulder, just as the magnetic seal lifted and the door shuddered open.

He stepped into the cargo pod and Cass came up short.

There was a capsule of some kind inside. It was tall, its paint blue and peeling. It was, she realised, made of wood. Backlit words near the top proclaimed it to be a "Police Public Call Box", whatever that was. The man seemed to think she was scared, rather than confused.

"Don't worry," he assured her, "it's bigger on the inside."

Cass' stomach dropped through the deck. Her eyes widened, her heart stopped and her blood went cold. "What did you say? Bigger on the inside? Is that what you said?"

The man was nearly at the box now, one hand resting on its faded brass door handle. "Yes! Come on, you'll love it."

She could barely bring herself to say what came out of her mouth next. "Is this a TARDIS?"

"Yes," he answered, and all of Cass' worst fears were confirmed. "But you'll be perfectly safe, I promise you."

His words fell on deaf ears. She jerked her hand away, stepping backwards out of the cargo pod. "Don't touch me!" she roared, her fear and confusion forgotten in an instant, replaced by a hot, boiling fury. She knew this man. She knew what he was. He was evil. Pure evil.

"I'm not part of the war," he said, his face growing hard. "I swear to you. I never was."

It was a lie. She knew it. "You're a Time Lord," she spat.

"Yes, I'm a Time Lord, but I'm one of the nice ones," he said, stepping towards her. He was almost pleading now, but Cass was having none of it.

"Get away from me!"

He froze. "Look on a bright side. I'm not a Dalek."

"Who can tell the difference anymore?" she said, and slapped the cargo pod hatch shut again. She might be in a crashing ship but she was safer being on the other side of a magnetic seal from that monster.

"Cass!" he cried.

"It's deadlocked! Don't even try!" she shouted to him, hoping he'd buy the bluff. The deadlock seals had always confounded Time Lord sonic technology.

"Cass," he pleaded, "just open the door. I'm trying to help!"

Cass' last reserves of hope died away, replaced now with steely resolve. "Go back to your battlefield. You haven't finished yet. Some of the universe is still standing."

"I'm not leaving this ship without you," he protested.

She could have laughed. At least she was going to do some good on her way out. "Then you're going to die right here. Best news all day."

She stepped away from the door, staring at the man, cold steel in her eyes. The ship's shaking intensified, the alarms got louder. This was it. Cass closed her eyes and waited for the end to come.

* * *

The Doctor pounded on the inside of the magnetically sealed door, shouting Cass' name. She wasn't listening.

"No," he growled to himself. Not again. The universe had taken enough from him, this war had destroyed so much. Too much good had been lost from the universe. No more. Cass was good, too good to be lost like this. Her light was too bright to be extinguished here, now, in some nameless space ship smashed against the crust of some nameless world. He turned away from the door and made for the TARDIS.

Yanking the doors open, he stepped into the rarified confines of his time and space ship's dimensionally transcendental interior. The alarms and explosions of the dying ship outside were silenced, replaced with the distant hum of the TARDIS' idling engines.

He'd recently changed the desktop theme, altering the appearance of the control room. It was smaller than it had been, the Gothic arches replaced by supporting beams made of a faintly glowing coral substance. The walls were closer, a sterile, bright white that shined with a strange, intrinsic light. His mind was racing, every second that ticked by a second less he had to save Cass.

So what if she didn't want to be saved? He wouldn't allow her to die. Not like this. Not if he could help it.

His fingers flew across the six sides of the TARDIS console, trying to coax some solution out of it. He didn't have enough time to use a tractor beam to pull Cass' ship out of the planet's gravity well and with the ship's rapid descent he couldn't be sure to make the right calculations to materialise safely around Cass. He'd have to do this the old fashioned way: with a bit of trickery and a lot of luck.

"Come on, come on, come on," he said as he tried to link the TARDIS' telepathic circuitry to the dying ship's computer. The systems were old, obsolete and the Doctor was reminded that the war had taken its toll on the lower life forms of the universe, as well as the time sensitives. Chaos and destruction were the order of the day all across the cosmos. Time was tearing itself apart as the Daleks and the Time Lords slugged it out in the higher planes and throughout the Vortex.

He'd lied to Cass. Though he had avoided the war this long but he had never truly been separate from it. He'd been there at the beginning, at the very first act of what was already being called the Last Great Time War. He'd been sent to Skaro with the explicit instructions to make sure the Daleks were never created, so long ago. He'd thwarted their plans when they invaded Earth for the second time, an invasion that had cost him so much, had even threatened his sanity.

On that terrible day, he'd come so close to losing even his hope, that fundamental part of him.

He had been at war with the Daleks since he'd first set foot on Skaro soon after fleeing Earth in the 1960s, had battled them throughout time and space. He'd never be free of them, never be free of the fight, but he was still the Doctor. He wouldn't, _couldn't_, let them or this war take that away from him.

He would save Cass. He would do it. He had failed too many times, watched too many friends die. Lucie Miller's last words still echoed in his ears, he still saw Sara Kingdom aged to death before his very eyes, still felt the grief and agony of losing Adric.

No more.

The console dinged. It had made contact with the ship's computer. Instantly, data flooded across his screen. The ship was powered by a microgravity drive, which generated a small gravity field and used its interplay with larger gravity fields to power the ship's flight, almost like a skateboard riding the curvature of space-time. A run-in with a small-scale singularity had damaged the engine, burning out its resonator coils and nearly destroying the ship.

Instantly, the Doctor knew what he had to do.

The ship was now well and truly inside the planet's atmosphere and falling fast. He had seconds to act. He used the TARDIS' own engines to create a magnetic feedback loop in the damaged core of the microgravity drive. He'd destroy what was left of the engine, but he only needed one last pulse of energy. Just a few seconds...

It worked!

The inner light of the TARDIS dimmed for a second as it shunted a great deal of power into the dying gunship's drive. The console screeched a warning as every system aboard the gunship was shorted out, the engine core shattered. It didn't matter. He'd done it.

He'd used the drive to create a separate gravity bubble around the ship, bouncing it off the planet's own gravity and maybe, just maybe, slowing its descent just enough to prevent a catastrophic collision.

He bolted from the console to the TARDIS doors, throwing them open as he stepped out into the cargo pod. Stepped out into hell. Everything was on fire, the bulkheads and deckplates cracked open. Acrid, acidic smoke filled the air and he felt a prickling on his skin that could mean only one thing: the shattered engine core was belching hard radiation. The sudden, enormous dose he'd just been exposed to nearly made him throw up, overwhelming even his Time Lord body.

His mouth fell open and he almost screamed. What had he done?

* * *

The jagged outcroppings that dominated the rocky surface of Karn resembled nothing so much as gnarled teeth jutting from the gaping more of some abominable creature. From orbit, the planet seemed a dull, unremarkable brown. From the surface, an eery, hideous beauty could entrance an observer with its cold, stark inevitability.

Through the green and purple twilight sky, the winged form of the gunship burnt a trail of red and yellow flame, bleeding radiation and debris. It dropped like a stone towards the ground, caught in gravity's fatal embrace.

The sonic boom generated by the descent shook the dust from the wall of the Sisterhood's main cavern. Draped in bolts of gold and red fabric, her long hair frazzled and her face brittle and unkind, Sister Ohila watched the falling ship with something approaching glee. She had never met him, but she knew his name. All of the Sisterhood did, for it was spoken in whispers of reverence and fear and distrust.

The gunship slammed into the surface, sending up a plume of dust and smoke and wreckage. Ohila smiled a thin, wolfish smile.

"Here he is at last, the man to end it all," she said to the quartet of sisters that attended her. "My sisters, the Doctor has returned to Karn."

The four women looked at each in horror and surprise, but Ohila felt nothing aside from anticipate and vindication. She had always cleaved to the prophecy that the Doctor would be back, a prophecy that had taken on new meaning as the monsters of Gallifrey and Skaro waged their unceasing war throughout all of creation.

"We have always known the Doctor would return to us," she said to them, turning to face them and to scare away the last of their doubts. "Such a pity he's dead."

They looked at her, all young and unblemished in their red robes.

"Sister?" one asked, confused.

Ohila closed her eyes. "Can't you feel that pain? He is being burnt away. There will be nothing left by the time he reaches us."

"Should we go to him, sister?" another of her attendants piped up.

She shook her head. "No. We must not. We must wait for him to come to us. We must wait for him to want to become the creature that we need to end all of this."

The sisters shivered involuntarily. They felt the chaos the war had unleashed on the universe, felt it in their bones and their skin and in the negative spaces that punctuated their daily life. They exchanged worried glances, clutching their robes with anxiety.

Ohila lifted a hand. "Fear not, my sisters. He will come. He will have no choice."

Somewhere, she knew, far away, the Doctor was stirring. The Time Lord cometh.


End file.
